W an icon of Present’s kin; perhaps an in
experience, the x-height a proper stand
For a tiny little Ampersand. Then & Now;
Now & Forever, and so and so on.

That curly twirl of a typographical trick cures a mortar
between Liquid bricks (someday seemed a prickly
kiss, but as is known not all will writhe & wilt)
stacked to the top of the Spillway wall.

I’ll sprint with wind here, many times have I
laid bare in the summer scorch, some
days I show my face, for worth. That in
accessibility that yelled anonymity
is the now impossibilty, thank GOD: I
need no one to be myself
under a cloud formless as it
Was, Is, and Yet.

Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the world is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thoughts to his conscience and returns… we exclaim within ourselves, without breaking the external silence.

-Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

(via amoslanka)

[First objective, make up words.  Second objective, mull through some sentences and bruise syntax and fight my way to the period, if not a semicolon first. Third objective, don't stop.  And press "Publish" {which makes it sound quite romantic} without a redaction.]

Lately I have written more letters to persons than I have journals here, and I mean that is currently what it looks like for me to document a certain sojourn, and, well, I think that is more of the point anyway.  A point I have been missing for a while.

It is not that I have not taken to the discipline of letter composition in the many years of stops along thispresentsojourn, but perhaps it is that I have begun to understand its importance at the expense of this site more than another time before.  I won’t think that is something for which I will never apologize – silence — especially I think if what is silence to some is to another laughter and tears and hours and hours laying on our backs in a pre-war bedroom on the cold wood floors of fall.

So as I prepare in the next few months to take quite a heavy step on the way which Call carves, I might begin to post some letters from throughout the past year, some anonymously, and some maybe as a fictional correspondence 0f fictional characters. Who the narrator is we might or might not be able to gather, but what is the point anyway is that people are built in such a way that they are incomplete without others, and letters speak to this more than what I’ve been so focused on here.  Not to say this is unimportant (or I wouldn’t be writing these words at all).

Here is to another shift, and to the acknowledgement that each day is a shift in a Shift, a becoming in a Becoming.  And on the days we are shitty and destroyed do shitty things and destroy others because of it, our hope that somehow and someway we through and by that and moreover our dedication to the interconnectivity with others we are and (I think) miraculously being made whole and right.

If reality is a fabric that is stitched together by participation and by mutuality and by love, then the snags and tears and rips caused by the inverse will be repaired, and the repair will somehow be better than the original garment. I can’t say I’ve believed that for years — at least as much as I wrote it down and wanted (forced myself) to think it True.

Anyways, as is my fascination with letter-writing and the desire to see that sort of correspondence on a deeper, stronger, more human level than the lofty, propositional, self-examinatory, open-audience sort of way (that was congruent with my stage of life that began in a certain City and carried on as a deeply search-full postlude) which in fact became the reason I purchased a domain name and hosting in the first place. A documentary of a becoming. Of course this is still that, but how that is fleshed in writing is as different as how it has been fleshed in experience.

Here’s to the sea-foam ascot and crimson coats of our past futures, and of our present pasts or simple pitter-patter.  This. This is it. This is.

Time, or whatever redefinition of it today appends, shows that a past want is neither it or what brings one back to a Thing or a Time, but rather the certain ways the pieces didn’t quite Seal — the Mortar not quite dry — and how it needs simply a consistent intake of oxygen to complete the Process which makes that which was once a malleable paste into a binder; resilient, and a source of fortification for those things with which it comes into contact.

If anything, I can affirm now that Ryan Adams’ Demolition is a dangerous listen, and to add within a related framework if any a time to feel human this is that. Until writing fully about this next, I’ll rise with the Dawn, hand off a guitar amplifier through which six years of music has passed — the meaning of this transaction something gargantuan, and my time with dear friends at the lake only serve to reinforce this very transition has been inaugurated but of course has not fully come to pass.

Another year, and I am the child my mother is nursing, and I am the sixth-grade child whose baseball games my dad never missed once, and I am the high school child who wishes to be anywhere close as cool as his older sister, and I am the college child (child, child, child!) with a girlfriend I’d obviously marry, and I am the intentionally single child living in the Upper East Side of New York City, and more fully of all I am the child who returned from a remote East Texan lake with sunkilled shins, laying in a bed at the city-center with the whole of each of these parts combined for seeing. And I am the man in forty-two years who will more truly be yet will not most truly be.  This is the land of “yet” and “not fully,” and I know this isn’t my residence if in terms of permanency.

Lake-lays tend to do terrible things to a person, which is our hope.  And of course I can’t agree more that we are being created by being destroyed.  None of this is at all negative if above the narrative, which we really aren’t.

“I yearn to see County Down in the snow; one almost expects to see a march of dwarfs dashing past. How I long to break into a world where such things were true.”

I’m unsure what it is psychologically that occurs when I lace up a pair of boots, fasten tight Chuck’s Converse pair, or even (the rare moment) when I slip into some Rainbows. But truth is that something occurs. Barefeet is for busywork no doubt, but I’ve observed that both the quality and the quantity of my work as a freelancer take a turn north when my feet are covered, snug, and secured over some soles.  Plus, the intensity of the process and product are directly to related how formal a shoe choice I’ve made.

Today, I’m wearing my shiny-black-best, ankle high and freshly manicured by the local cobbler himself.

I’ve gotta wrangle with some dirty-work today, finally filling my sink with Drain-O and covering the floorspace in my cupboard with a container for recycling.  Toss in the task-list-stew a dash or two of client invoicing, a tablesepoon of typewriter hunting upon the interwebs, and a heaping, brimming cup of design layout finalization (which has been oiling my figurative gears, spinning my proverbial wheels, and making elastic my sticky, structuralish boundary-building ways).

This is all to say hello. Or that we exist.  Fairweather to you, and if or if not, of course something Meaningful.

Or, is my heart so hard as to not see?
Spring forth, if weathering is past! Eat
some lukewarm pourage or inhale
meals of steam. Even the mange
shed skin. Tears.

“No more tears!” whispers the Lamb,
“No more fears!” the Lion roars.

So we settle in our plights,
Separate as they came, some Mammoth
of Meaning burned and engraved
upon our hearts.

We set off for Arkadelphia, and upon arrival [this is true] I nearly cried result of the weighty meaning of the place.  I showed girl all the spots, not limited to the center for students, my old dorms, and the place I learned to play piano and some Koine and also how to brew the proper cup of coffee from a certain Old Testament professor.  All these things were harder to spit out, going on three years removed from a place I selfishly wanted to avoid all until my senior year, when I met brothers whose relationship has set quite standard for any and all-oh who follow.   Walking the campus on Saturday, I was unable to remember anything but the good of the place, which could or could not mean it outweighs the bad.

The rest of the day we spent jaunting on foot through the historic town of Hot Springs.  After the recording of a few time lapse videos during the dismissal of an Oaklawn race we made Polaroids near a giant mosaic of Jesus Christ, King of the World [as well as a mural that read $.10, under which I stood at the artistic direction of girl.  She perceives me as cheap, is it?].   Thankfully, we had no sense of Chronos while in the Hot Springs and were able to peacefully lay in a city-center lawn beneath the afternoon sun for however long, trading my eyeglasses for her sunglasses, the wind on our cheeks.  Eventually we removed the grass from our shoulders and continued our hike through the hillfull downtown, planning to double-back and find dinner in a downtown nook.

After the final Polaroid of a ten-piece roll was composed under a sign reading “LA BOHEMIA,” girl and I searched for the perfect spot [nothing less would satisfy] and finally ended up at a location known as OSAKA, which is a word difficult to say quickly three times in a row.   We sat in socks on a pad of floral pillows on the cedar woodfloor ["look beneath the floorboards"] and sampled from a Rainbow, some Dynamite, a Spider, and the Noir.  When no dinner was left, we stopped for a Black on the patio of a major coffee chain and fled the state of Arkansas, peeling back the Indigo and looking for our Dallas on the other side of Twilight.

Four and a half hours of sleep-driving later. Crooked Tree faithfully [as is she always] held my car captive until my return, and, after transferring all my items from girl’s-good-gas-mileage Sky-on, I cut through the black night to Vickery, which is where I realized I have an easier time falling asleep at the wheel than in my own bed.  Not to mention [though I will mention] my neighborhood often on the weekends sounds like a mix of a 1974 Harlem and a mid-nineties frat party [which is a bad, bad mix], and 4 am was the first my eyes shut.

Even so, mayhaps one of the best weekends I’ve ever known.  If I may use such ultimate language, of course.

My hair is naturally curly and pretty awfully thick, and at the point it grows out a bit [it currently lays at four inches] the brown mass emerging from my scalp looks much more like a small animal than it does a proper portion of follicles filled.

Cutting one’s own hair seems a luxury.  All the time people tell me how nice it is that I don’t have to make the drive somewhere and pay some Joe to trim my headhairs.  Admittedly, in this sense, it is a bit nice to be able to control my own hair length-reducing schedule, but throw in the fact that I am a natural-born and bred procrastinator, and the situation is a bit more complex.  And since my hair in its more grown-out stages can be judged more by breadth and than it can by length [see previous re: small animal], and well, all is not peaches and cream, as adage-abusers say.

There are some perks to what, at this point, might seem a predicament.  One is this: to the thin-haired types, the grass is much greener on this side of the Fence.  But we are equally cursed!  It is too rather difficult to sit on this side of the fence and see anything but the green on that other side.  I suppose I could still consider it compliment.

From another positive angle, I’ve the opportunity to fulfill the Texas big-hair stereotype [haireotype?] by keeping my hairs looking like they do right now.  And why not reinforce what Hollywood already does about the Great State where I was raised?  Sure, it’s not regularly men who are subject to the perception [whether it is true or if it isn't], but I suppose Here’s better than anywhere else to fit in.

Finally, there are a number of grassroots organizations and support groups available for those of us with a large helping of hair upon our heads.  I’ve expressed my concern at different points with other like-minded[/haired] before, hoping that these commoners will provide plight-consolation, and usually they do!  Not trying to give away too much information since anonymity is what adheres our group and keeps it functioning, but affirmatively existing is an underground network of those of us who share the plight.

That to say, if you too struggle with the reality that your coiffure is nearly too heavy for your head so much so that you have the need for frequent trips chiropractor to provide therapy to your neck and back because of the weight it must bear, well, I understand.

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*this post is dedicated to The Great Laken and Alexandria the Great Wall*